- Mads Mikkelsen is having a career year, and he is reveling in it. It started with his best actor award at Cannes for playing a nursery school teacher accused of pedophilia in the Danish drama "The Hunt." Of the prize, he says: "It gives me a little more gasoline and belief in what I am doing."

There's a second art-house film made in his native Denmark, the costume drama "A Royal Affair," opening Friday. After appearing as a villain in several Hollywood blockbusters, this time Mikkelsen gets to be the good guy - a real-life 18th century German doctor and proponent of Enlightenment who attends the king of Denmark while engaging in a licentious relationship with his wife.

High-profile character

As if having two films on the festival circuit isn't enough, at the end of summer Mikkelsen began shooting his most high-profile role - one that guarantees he will no longer be identified first as Le Chiffre, the sadistic Bond villain with a penchant for gambling in "Casino Royale." Mikkelsen has the title role in the new TV series "Hannibal," about the gourmet cannibal. NBC is so high on the show that the network ordered 13 episodes without demanding a pilot first. The show is expected to air next season.

Slipping into a hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival, Mikkelsen glances at a tape recorder and the person fiddling with it, smiles and says: "Here we are."

Dressed in an expensive-looking gray suit and shiny black slippers, he is the picture of elegance, his graceful movements attesting to his decade as a professional dancer. He has penetrating, wide-set eyes and high cheekbones rivaling Christian Bale's.

Losing identity in roles

Hannibal Lecter is obviously on his mind. After hearing writer Bryan Fuller pitch his concept for the show, "My first thought was can we get away with all this because (Hannibal) is extreme," Mikkelsen recalls in fluent English with just a trace of an accent. The series picks Hannibal up early in his professional life when he is a rich psychiatrist hired to help an FBI profiler (played by Hugh Dancy) who, although clever, cannot handle serial murder cases.

"So they hire me to handle them," says Mikkelsen, who internalizes his characters to the extent that his identity gets lost in them. "Basically, I am there to support him, and so I end up in the FBI in the middle of the cases. For Hannibal, it's like being in a candy store."

Hannibal is already a murderer many times over, but the FBI has no idea.

"How could it not be?" Mikkelsen says. "What he did was so scarily good. We are not trying to copy anything. But we can't separate it totally."

There's a mentally unbalanced character in "A Royal Affair" as well - Danish King Christian VII (played by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard).

'Very complicated man'

"He was definitely a very complicated man," says Mikkelsen, who read the king's letters and books about him. "In England, they hated him because he wrecked all their brothels and the places he went. He was behaving like a lunatic. But in Germany, they loved him. He was definitely up and down."

The film suggests the king practiced an early version of S&M. But there is nothing to indicate he was in a homoerotic relationship with Mikkelsen's character. The royal menage a trois did not extend that far.

For the king's doctor to have engaged in an affair with Denmark's queen was risky beyond belief.

"He was like anyone having an adulterous affair," Mikkelsen says. "You are blindfolded yourself. You don't see the dangers. He could have picked anyone in court, and then it would have been a different story, but he didn't. Whether it was because of his feeling that he could do anything or whether it was because he just couldn't help it, we will have to guess.

"But when you read their letters, you see they were madly in love with each other. They had found a partnership. They both believe in the concept of Enlightenment and bringing it to the nation. They were on the same page."

Mikkelsen has had quite a run of movie parts, considering that he got a late start. The 46-year-old actor was a gymnast in Copenhagen when he was hired to do flips in the background of a musical. He was asked if he wanted to learn a few steps of a dance number.

"I had nothing else to do, so I said yes," said Mikkelsen, who spun that into a 10-year career dancing in shows such as "Chicago," "West Side Story" and "La Cage aux Folles."

From dancing to drama

During a summer studying with Martha Graham in New York, he met dancer and choreographer Hanne Jacobsen. They have been married 25 years and have a grown son and daughter.

"I loved the drama of dancing," he says. "I asked myself, 'Why not do drama full time?' So I went back to school to study drama."

American audiences first became aware of Mikkelsen in the Danish film "After the Wedding," in which he plays the son in a frighteningly dysfunctional wealthy family. The film was made under the "pure cinema" rules of the Danish film movement Dogme 95.

Although Mikkelsen became the poster boy for the movement, he now admits he was never fond of it.

"Dogme was a genius trick, and it placed the filmmakers on the map, so I am grateful they came up with it," he said. "But I never found it interesting. I think, obviously, every film should be about the story, but I don't need rules to tell me that. It is too banal to say it should always be about the script." {sbox}